Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Unfairly
overshadowed by Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza in the
foreign-language film category at the 2014 Oscars, this remarkable movie from
Belgium reminds us that heavy subjects don't necessarily make heavy movies.
There are many ways a filmmaker can engage us emotionally without appealing to
our most basic Pavlovian instincts.

Spoilers
abound! In fact, this entry is intended more as an analysis than a review of
the film.

The story
is set in Ghent, Belgium and develops over a period of about eight years. Elise
is a tattoo artist with deep religious beliefs, Didier a musician in a
bluegrass band, and a nonbeliever. Although he fiercely defends his atheism, Didier
has developed a religion of his own, infatuated as he is with the myth of
America, the "best place on earth" and the country where "you
can start all over again". They fall in love, Elise joins the band as a
singer and they start to perform in the local scene to increasing acclaim. At
first they live in a caravan parked in front of a rural shack, enjoying the
freedom of the country and somewhat reenacting the lives of the settlers
celebrated by bluegrass music. But when Maybelle is born, the family moves to
the newly-restored farm house which Didier has even provided with a
"terranda", a glass room halfway between a terrace and a veranda.
Happy years follow, until a bolt from the blue diverts the natural course of
life: Maybelle is diagnosed with a form of cancer from which she will not
recover — that's where the life circle of the title interrupts. Her death
precipitates the family, or what is left of it, into an abyss of desperation
culminating with Elise's suicide.

This is,
more or less, a linear synopsis of the film. Putting yourself in the filmmaker's
shoes, how would you tell such a story? In other words: how would you build the
movie's plot? The most obvious choice might be to start from the protagonists' first encounter, then follow the chronological succession of events:
marriage, pregnancy, birth, illness, and the tragic conclusion. Alternatively
you could focus on the couple's grief, occasionally flashing back to the happy
years. Director Felix Van Groeningen takes a different path: he shuffles the
chronological order of events, showing us from the very beginning both the
harsh reality of the disease's progression and the happiest moments of Elise
and Didier's relationship.

The first
scene features Didier playing the Christian song "Will The Circle Be
Unbroken?" on stage with his band, the bright colors and the performers'
energy setting a light, joyful mood. Then we get the movie's title, and the
following scene shows a nurse handling a syringe in an aseptic hospital room.
The abrupt juxtaposition of two situations so far apart is thematic: in the
course of the film, the old-as-time problem of the compatibility between the
existence of God and evil will be repeatedly called into question, and both
Elise's faith and Didier's skepticism will be put to a hard test.

The clash
in tone between the first two scenes also prefigures the overall structure of
the movie. We can divide the story into two segments: the first one, about 50
minutes long, covers the couple's romance, and Maybelle's illness and premature
death; the second segment lasts approximately 61 minutes and concentrates on
the couple's grief, at times returning to their first year of relationship. Each
segment, in turn, can be divided into various sequences that identify three
main narrative lines. It's useful to label them with letters so that we can
easily follow at which points temporal shifts occur:

(A) Elise
and Didier's romance and "marriage"; Maybelle's birth and first six
years of life

(B) Maybelle's illness, therapy and death; couple's first days of grief

(C) Elise's
attempted suicide; euthanasia.

Segment 1
displays an alternation of sequences A and B only, according to an ABAB scheme. Segment 2, which begins short after Maybelle's passing, also introduces
sequences of type C and follows a more complicated CBAB pattern. The graph and
the legend below show the complete stream of 19 sequences; the y-axis
represents the duration in minutes of a sequence (the higher the column, the
longer the sequence).

(A1)
(Opening credits.) On their first date, Didier plays a banjo serenade for Elise

(B1)
Maybelle is hospitalized for the first time

(A2) Elise
and Didier's "wild life"

(B2)
Maybelle's health worsens

(A3) Elise
and Didier perform their first concert together; Elise's first three months of
pregnancy

(B3) Bald-headed because of the chemotherapy, Maybelle returns back home

(A4)
Flashback to the night Maybelle was likely conceived; Elise's last months of pregnancy;
New Year's Eve 2003

(B4)
Chemotherapy fails, stem-cell therapy starts

(A5) Maybelle's
sixth birthday

(B5)
Maybelle's death and funeral

(C1) On the
way to the hospital again: Elise is in a coma. Dissolve into the next shot (see
frame atop the page)

(A7)
Marriage
(B9) Elise's
new name; Didier's public ranting against religion; definitive split-up; Elise's attempted suicide; a series of flashback provides a link to the final
sequence

(C3) Elise's
last breaths of life; euthanasia. (End credits.)

It might seem reductive to treat a film like a set of blocks, but I think that putting on paper what the filmmaker does on screen in this case can tell us something not only about the way the film is organized, but also about the "philosophy" lying behind it. First of all, the film's flow of
information is extremely dynamic: the average sequence duration is about 5.8 minutes (but only 4.6 if we exclude the two final and longest sequences), which means that
we are forced to redirect our attention to different narrative lines rather
often considering that the movie's entire duration is approximately 111
minutes.

Moreover,
although A, B and C are consecutive chapters of a same story, the film achieves
what we could call a multi-threaded suspense. In fact, even though we know from
B-sequences that Maybelle will eventually become ill, we are still curious to
learn where it all began, and how her parents became aware of the first
symptoms. And while we follow the couple's first fights after Maybelle's death,
we also want to know more about how their relationship was born, a situation
reminiscent of Harold Pinter's theatrical play Betrayal.

Another
consequence of splitting up and rearranging story time is that intense dramatic
moments, which are intrinsic to a story involving illness and death, are often
interspersed with life-affirming scenes. This alternation of tones prevents the
movie from being a progression of events toward an ineluctable ending, like in
our chronologically ordered option: the filmmaker apparently doesn't want to
indulge neither in sorrow nor in joy for too long. The film's ending seems to
confirm this: in the movie's crucial last shot we learn from a tattoo on
Elise's skin that she still loves Didier, but interestingly we don't get a
scene where Didier discovers the tattoo. Another director would have exploited
the dramatic force of this final revelation more extensively; here, instead,
the final extreme close-up of the tattoo is perhaps addressed more to the
viewer than to the character of Didier, and functions as a sort of epitaph for
the story. We might even have doubts about whether Didier really saw it.
[1]

The movie's
overall pattern has a strong thematic relevance as well. Narrative lines A and
B proceed in parallel up to sequence A5, which provides a "suture" to the earlier
sequence B1 (see the double-slash highlighting in the graph): in fact, Maybelle
is hospitalized at the age of six, which is exactly the point where sequence A5
ends. Moreover, sequences B9 and C3 provide a link between lines
B and C by means of a series of flashbacks happening in Elise's mind
(highlighted with a cross in the graph). Even the first and the last sequences,
both having Didier perform a country song dedicated to Elise, provide a
conceptual (not chronological) link between C and A. The movie portrays a family's disintegration under the blows of an unfathomable force, and
yet its quasi-circular structure seems an effort to restore what God,
nature or destiny has destroyed, providing a constructive answer to the
question "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?"

Pattern regularity, however, doesn't prevent blocks from flourishing in unexpected
directions. In this respect, it's worth examining an excerpt of sequence B4
more in detail. Its main theme is always Maybelle's deteriorating health, but
within itself it displays a rather complex pattern made up of three micro-sequences, again unfolding in parallel:

(a) Maybelle's
doctor recommends a new therapy based on stem-cell transplantation.

(c) Elise is
back home from work; Didier tells her about the episode of the dead bird.

To complicate
things, micro-sequence c is further subdivided in two gradually overlapping
parts:

(c1) Elise
tenderly caresses Maybelle sleeping on the couch.

(c2) Didier
tells Elise about the "difficult afternoon".

In the
scene leading up to micro-sequence a, Maybelle has found a dead bird in the
terranda, and she is presumably confronted with the idea that she herself will have
to die. Didier tries to comfort her, but she runs away crying. At this point, a
sound bridge provides a link to the beginning of micro-sequence a, where
Maybelle's doctor is explaining to her parents how stem-cell therapy works.

(a)

A cut to the pressurized room leads into micro-sequence b:

(b)

Now sequence c1 is introduced. Elise's car is visible through a window of the living room, where Didier is reading:

(c1)

(c1)

As Elise gets out of the car, the sound track anticipates the later conversation with Didier,
while the images delay that moment:

(c1)

(c1)

At this point we get
an alternation of images from c2 and c1, respectively in and out of sync with
Didier's voice. Note also the false continuity between the last two shots,
whose chronological order is reversed:

(c2)

(c1)

(c2)

(c2)

(c1)

Two more
sound bridges bring us back to Maybelle's hospital room first, where her parents
jokingly pretend to be going away...

(c2)

(c2)

(b)

...then again in the terranda (c2):

(b)

(c2)

One last
sound bridge (I swear!) and we return to the doctor's office (a):

(c2)

(a)

What I find
interesting about the sequence I've just described is that it reproduces, in
little, the macro-structure of the whole film, although it follows a less
regular scheme. Actually, more instances of this Chinese boxes-pattern could be
isolated. So the director doesn't content himself with mixing up things at a
macro-level, he also lets the film ramify, fractal-like, making the viewing
even more absorbing.

One might
wonder whether the intricacy of the plot works against intelligibility. However
convoluted the structure might appear, though, the good news is that temporal
shifts are more difficult to describe than to follow. As it often happens, many
cues help us to identify which narrative line we're in. For example,
B-sequences generally unfolds in the hospital, and when this is not the case, a
foulard on Maybelle's head immediately signals that she has already undergone
chemo. Thanks to such strategies, the film needs to recur to temporal indications
only sporadically. There's only one caption saying "7 years previously" at the end of sequence B1, while other hints are embedded in the story world (the
9/11 attacks shown on tv, the New Year's Eve 2003 celebration, and so on).

Another
issue the filmmaker must have faced is the excessive fragmentation due to
multi-threaded structure. The problem, I think, has been successfully addressed
employing a variety of techniques. I've already mentioned false continuity,
which establishes a correlation between two moments that, in principle, aren't
related at all. Besides, within a sequence flashbacks and flashforwards can add
evocative details referencing earlier or later sequences. Transitions between
scenes happen seamlessly, often by means of elaborate sound bridges, as we have
seen, or ingenious conceptual links. My favorite cut, an example of what we
could call "false conceptual continuity", occurs after Maybelle has
undergone the first cycle of therapy. Elise asks her daughter to close her eyes
and imagine something nice: immediately after, a fast-moving lateral tracking
shot shows a horse running in a meadow, only to reveal the side view mirror of
Didier's car on the left side of the frame.

Sometimes,
relations between temporally distant events are evocated with purely pictorial
analogies. A constellation of plastic stars may acquire new significance when
compared to a heap of pills floating before Elise's face.

For all these
reasons, The Broken Circle Breakdown is probably the most engaging
"new" movie I've seen this year so far. In this entry I've
concentrated mostly on structure, but there would also be plenty to say about
the importance of certain symbols, or the movie's provocative messages in
relation to faith, politics, and bioethics. But that's another post.

1. ^Just
out of curiosity: as it often happens with foreign movies distributed in Italy,
the movie's Italian title is itself a
major spoiler: Alabama Monroe - Una storia d'amore.

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